Vero, the hottest image-sharing social media app at the present moment, is taking aim at Instagram, the undisputed king of mobile image sharing platforms. Vero is attempting to lure photographers and artists who have grown weary of the ubiquitous advertisements, algorithmic timeline, and inability to share links, as well as the image ratio limitations on the Facebook-owned mobile app.

New users to Vero are given a “free for life” offer, eventually leading to a fee based subscription model for later users (I’m skeptical this will work) instead of advertisements for revenue. Vero also uses a chronological timeline instead of an algorithm to distribute content to followers. Photographers and artists will certainly applaud that feature. And Vero has no trouble displaying vertical images without cutting off the top and bottom, whether the ratio is 2:3 or 4:5. You would think this would be an easy fix for Instagram.

At the moment, due to the platform’s rapid growth, the system is slow and experiences intermittent downtime. This can be written off as growing pains as the membership has ballooned from 150,000 to 3 million in only a couple of weeks. The terms of service have scared many people off but they are no more “nefarious” than Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, et al – standard CYA legalese. Vero’s controversial cofounder and CEO Ayman Hariri, son of assassinated Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, has drawn some criticism for past business dealings and the funding for the app. These are all things to consider before joining.

But the Vero product appears to be a good one in the very limited time I’ve been using it. Vero could quite possibly flame out over the next month or two, like many other recent social media upstarts. But then again, it could take a considerable bite out of Instagram’s dominance. We will wait and watch. That’s my Vero avatar on left and yes, you can feel free to follow me.

Richard Bernabe is a professional photographer specializing in travel, wildlife, and nature as well as an author of books, magazine articles, and travel essays published world-wide. Richard is a global influencer is the fields of photography, travel, and wildlife conservation with more than one million followers on social media platforms. He leads several photography tours and workshops all over the world and is invited to speak to photography and conservation groups all across the globe. For more great information on new images, gear reviews, book projects, and photography workshops and tours,Sign Up For Our Newsletter.

An upcoming change to how Facebook manages its news feed will have a big impact on photographers who use business pages to share their content with followers and clients.

In a January 11, 2018 post to his personal account, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote, “Recently we’ve gotten feedback from our community that public content — posts from businesses, brands and media — is crowding out the personal moments that lead us to connect more with each other,” He went on to say, “you’ll see less public content like posts from businesses, brands, and media. And the public content you see more will be held to the same standard — it should encourage meaningful interactions between people.”

This change will hit the Facebook business pages particularly hard. For photographers who use pages to share photos and videos with their followers, they will see a lot less engagement in the coming months. The changes to the algorithm Facebook uses to disseminate content to its users will allow fewer photos and videos from photographers’ commercial pages from being seen on followers’ feeds.

An inside source at Facebook told me over the weekend that unless your business is spending thousands of dollars in advertising per month, your commercial page will “probably die a slow death.”

I’ve noticed less follower engagement on my Facebook page over the past 12 months, even though my number of followers continued to rise. Lately it seems as if it’s the same 7 to 9 people making comments on every image posted. I experimented with posting directly to my Facebook page, as well as auto-posting from my Instagram account. Same results. I suspect this will be a net positive for consumers of content – particularly of family and friends – and a negative for media, small businesses and creators such as musicians, artists, and photographers.

This change should continue to differentiate the primary roles of the two most dominant social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, as the former steps away from its role as an accidental publisher and disseminator of news while the latter fully cements that claim. It appears Facebook will be the place to connect with family and friends while Twitter will be where you get news, information, and/or publish news, media, and commercial content.

Richard Bernabe is a professional photographer specializing in travel, wildlife, and nature as well as an author of books, magazine articles, and travel essays published world-wide. Richard is a global influencer is the fields of photography, travel, and wildlife conservation with more than one million followers on social media platforms. He leads several photography tours and workshops all over the world and is invited to speak to photography and conservation groups all across the globe. For more great information on new images, gear reviews, book projects, and photography workshops and tours,Sign Up For Our Newsletter.